As a computer programmer, you are more equipped to make informed decisions when participating in the stock market.

There are lots of finance APIs out there that you can use to track the status of certain stocks.

Google’s finance API might have a lot of weight in the industry by it being published by Google, but it hasn’t been maintained for quite a few years.

There are definitely better options available on the market right now.

Google Finance API Overview

The Google finance API has sparse documentation, and you will be hard pressed to find any information about it published by Google.
Some third-party documentation covers the more basic aspects of its usage.

As far as public endpoints go, the Google Finance API is very standard. It’s able to take REST requests, and it returns the desired data in JSON format.

Please be aware that the Google Finance API isn’t supported by Google anymore, thus undocumented and unreliable. This should only be used for private toy applications, and it has a very real potential to change at any moment.

Public resources, such as RapidAPI, are a good source for learning about which APIs are maintained and available for public use.

Alternatives to Google Finance API

You will be able to find many alternatives for the Google Finance API in RapidAPI’s extensive database. Here are some of the top APIs we thought were worth mentioning:

How To Use the Yahoo Finance API

Alphavantage is also generally considered to be a good alternative to Google Finance because it’s actually being maintained, it has a public documentation, and it has an enormous amount of available data options that are tailored to your data-tracking interests.

As most APIs are, it offers free public endpoints, and it merely requires the use of a key for tracking your usage.

They do have a usage limit that can be prohibitive for some users, but your account can be upgraded to allow up to 1200 requests per minute with no throttling or blocking.

They allow you to track securities on FOREX, and they also allow you to track Cryptocurrencies as well. According to their website, they’re also a trusted data provider for institutions like Ycombinator and Harvard University, so they have some amount of authority within their field.

Investors Exchange Trading, or IEX, can be another viable alternative.

This option is preferable if you’re a developer that likes to make more rapid requests for data.

Their documentation does not disclose any limit to their API usage, and they have officially stated on their website that individual developers are allowed to make up to one hundred requests per second.

What’s Next?

Google finance API has been out of commission for quite a while, and it seems to have gone the way of Yahoo Finance. Fortunately, there are many other great options for programmatic traders who are looking for new public data endpoints.

In this article, we’ve gone over the functionality of Google Finance, which is deprecated and not officially available to the public.

Some other alternatives include the Unofficial Yahoo Finance API, Alphavantage, CurrencyLayer, IEX, and Tradier.

If you’re interested in trading from the same platform that you get your data from, Tradier is definitely your best option.

If you’re looking for high-resolution data and an unbeatable rate limit, then IEX is a superior option.

And if you’re interested in further reading, RapidAPI.com has an excellent selection of Finance APIs & Stock Market APIs that can help speed up your research.